A personal essay on spiritual bankruptcy, borrowed identities, and the terror of being truly known.

The Architecture of a Pragmatist

To understand the force with which a life can be dismantled, one must first appreciate the precision with which it was built.

My own consciousness was an architecture of calculated choices and measurable outcomes, erected in a society that rewards legibility over truth. I was a realist and this was a polite term. I treated life as a series of transactions. To grow up in Singapore is to internalise the grammar of competition, to learn that value is something proven, quantified, and won. My interior life was treated as a backlog of underperforming assets, a resource field to be optimised, disciplined, and rendered productive. This was not chaos; this was emotional poverty disguised as control, a fluency without feeling where there was no column in the ledger for the unprovable, no metric for the sublime.

My family's Buddhism belonged to this inherited landscape, a silent choreography I performed but never quite inhabited. The joss sticks, the temple visits, the quiet offerings - these were rituals of filial piety, motions of belonging that produced no internal resonance. I understood the gestures of belief, but the current of faith itself, that irrational and terrifying surrender, was a system whose utility could not be verified. It was a practice I could not quantify, and so it was refused. It failed to breach the intellectual armour I had so carefully constructed.

It was into this well-defended world that Christianity first made its entrance, not as a revelation, but as just another set of claims. It too, was weighed, measured, and found wanting, another system that failed to offer a credible return on the investment of my attention.

A Performance of Faith: The Borrowed Identity

There is a particular poverty in a love that mistakes another person for a destination. For a time, my life was organised around such a love, and the faith I professed was not a conviction but a costume, an identity borrowed in the hope of securing a belonging that had nothing to do with God.

At Anglo-Chinese Junior College, the weekly chapel services were an aesthetic experience detached from meaning. I attended not as a seeker but as a spectator. The hymns, the communal singing - it was a performance of uplift that required no genuine surrender, a fun karaoke session. When schoolmates extended invitations to their churches, I processed them through the cold calculus of my ambition. The hours demanded by faith represented a poor return on an investment better allocated to academics and the careful curation of a social life. Their invitations were a refusal of my core operating principle: optimisation.

Fast-forward a couple of years later, I met her. With her, the logic shifted. When she invited me to her church, I went not to meet her Jesus, but to become the kind of man who could be with her. My engagement with Christianity was an extension of my devotion to her. She was the entire system of meaning, the sun around which my ambitions now orbited. This was the moment I began to construct my new, borrowed identity.

The external markers of this persona were meticulously assembled: the dutiful church attendance; the Bible whose pages I marked with sincere but unfelt notes; the cross necklace worn as a signal of allegiance; the Telegram status updated to a verse from Ecclesiastes. This was not hypocrisy, which requires a knowing duplicity, but something more modern and tragic: the sincere, unprofitable labor of a man trying to inhabit a costume, hoping that the performance of a self might, through sheer repetition, conjure the genuine article. We live, after all, in a curated economy of affect, where the performance of depth is often mistaken for the slow, humiliating labor of actually undergoing one's own experience. But the central, unspoken truth of my spiritual poverty remained. As I confessed to myself in a moment of unflinching clarity, I would drop the cross any day if it meant choosing her. Another human being had become my entire framework for the ultimate, a fragile scaffold for a life that was, in truth, profoundly empty.

As I prepared to leave for an exchange program in Paris, that entire world, validated only by her presence, was poised for collapse.

The Unraveling: An Education in Absence

Physical distance is rarely just a matter of geography. My overseas program in France did not merely stretch the logistics of our relationship; it removed the very scaffolding that held my borrowed identity together. Without her presence to reflect my performance back at me, the entire construction began to shudder. Then it broke.

It was not a heartbreak. It was the deconstruction of a reality. A psychic vertigo.

Every calculation - career, future, faith - had been built around the central axiom of her. With her gone, the equation dissolved into meaninglessness. What was the career for? The ambition? The faith? A fiction. The entire map of the world had just been proven to be a fiction. A painful irony began to gnaw at me. How, I kept asking, how did this relationship hurt me so much more than my previous partners who weren't Christians? The question itself was the wound. By intertwining love with a borrowed theology, I had raised the stakes from mere emotional attachment to ultimate meaning. I had not just lost a partner; I had lost my god, my narrative of salvation. The void left in the wake of a love that was supposed to be underwritten by the divine was deeper and colder than any I had known before.

Broken and adrift, I found myself in Marseille, a city that would become the theater for my final confrontation with that void.

The Marseille Reckoning: A Confrontation in the Void

Marseille, in memory, is not a city but a condition. It was a symbolic landscape for spiritual desolation, a highly personalised discomfort chamber where every illusion would be stripped away.

I waited at the FlixBus station well past midnight, stepping into an atmosphere thick with menace. The air smelled of weed and desperation. My carefully constructed world had already collapsed internally; here, the external world seemed to mirror that collapse with terrifying fidelity. Isolated, I retreated into the sterile, anonymous safety of a Carl's Junior, a brightly lit box of corporate blandness in a city that felt hostile and ancient.

There, under the fluorescent lights, my despair sharpened into a specific, damning accusation. The pragmatist in me rendered his verdict. Wasn't following Christ supposed to be the solution to all problems? The question was not a plea for understanding; it was the cold fury of an investor reviewing a catastrophic loss. I had performed the rituals, worn the uniform. My transactional faith had failed to deliver.

It was there, in that plastic booth, that I reached the absolute zero of my spirit. I cursed God. I renounced him. It was the final, lucid act of a pragmatist closing a ledger on a failed investment, a moral bankruptcy declared not with rage, but with the cold fury of squandered capital. It was an act of total surrender, not to a higher power, but to utter hopelessness.

And in that precise moment of refusal, it happened. Not as a voice, not as a vision, but as a silent, unbidden arrival of words in my mind: Romans 8:31. The line was from Romans, a book I had not yet read. And so I did a quick Google search, to be greeted by this image:

Its arrival was not an act of memory. It was a rupture. This was not the wellness ideal of healing without rupture; this was grace arriving not as a reward for faith, but in the exact moment of its most violent rejection. It was a profound paradox, an intervention that defied every law of the transactional universe I had ever known. With the words came a feeling that was utterly alien: a wave of peace, security, and warmth that settled over me, a sensation that had no logical predicate, no discernible cause. It was an experience that resisted capture, that could not be optimised or converted into narrative value, and for that reason, it was the first truly real thing I had felt in years.

The crisis had passed, leaving in its wake not a solution, but a mystery.

The Discipline of a Given Faith

The aftermath of that night was not a triumphant victory. There was no cinematic swell of music, no immediate resolution. It was, instead, the beginning of a slower, more authentic, and often difficult practice of faith - the awkward, unsexy grit of rebuilding a life on a foundation I had not chosen, but had been given.

The miracle was entirely internal. My external circumstances did not magically rearrange themselves. My ex did not come back. The pain of the loss did not vanish. What had changed was the ground on which I stood.

Upon returning from France, I found my way into a lovely cell group. This was not a quick fix but the start of the slow, unprofitable labor of accumulating genuine emotional wealth: the capacity to live with complexity without advertising it. The old architecture of the pragmatist did not simply dissolve. There were times I faltered, skipping church because the ingrained impulse to "hustle" and optimise my time proved stronger than my nascent devotion. This refusal of a seamless self, this ongoing tension between the man I had been and the man I was becoming, was a testament to the messy reality of transformation. A seamless self is a marketing artifact; I was no longer interested.

My faith was not a product of my effort or understanding. It was a gift received in a moment of total spiritual bankruptcy, given not when I was righteous, but when I was broken; not when I was seeking, but when I was cursing. It is a faith defined not by the certainty of answers, but by the resonance of that initial, unprovable grace. It is a refusal to cheapen feeling, a refusal to mistake legibility for truth. It remains the one form of inner solvency acquired not through accumulation but through bankruptcy; a wealth proven not by its visibility, but by its stubborn refusal to be converted into value.

• Javian